Michael Winner

Michael Winner, who has died aged 77, was one of Britain’s few commercially
viable film directors; he also followed a late-flowering vocation as a
belligerent restaurant critic, becoming one of the country’s most outrageous
and opinionated food writers.

Photo: National Portrait Gallery

6:16PM GMT 21 Jan 2013

In the course of a film career lasting 40 years, he made more than 30 pictures, among which were sharp social comedies such as The System (1963) and The Jokers (1966). But he derived his wealth and lasting reputation from later Hollywood hokum – notably the frenzied and graphically violent Death Wish series.

Preceded by his faux film noir capers such as The Mechanic (1972) and The Stone Killer (1973) — “all long on gore”, as one observer put it, “and short on sense” — Winner’s controversial blockbuster Death Wish (1974), starred Charles Bronson as a middle-class architect on a gory mission of vengeance after street muggers murder his wife and rape his daughter.

Many critics complained that Winner’s film exploited American paranoia over rising urban violence. “Michael Winner stacks the deck to make vigilante justice the only recourse against widespread crime,” declared one. The public, on the other hand, could scarcely get enough of the action; cinema audiences burst into applause each time a mugger was shot on screen, and even the celebrated American reviewer Judith Crist, admiring its theme of “Aristotelian purgation”, confessed to numbering the film among her guilty pleasures.

Most American film writers took Winner seriously as a director, admiring his swift efficiency and unerring knack of coming in on, or under, budget. But in Britain he was widely regarded as a flaky, loud-mouthed show-off.

Certainly Winner was always larger-than-life. He drove a Rolls-Royce, paid no attention to his appearance (he was notorious for his jumble sale jackets and single pair of battered shoes) and was rarely seen without an enormous Montecristo cigar.

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Portrayed as “offensive, loud and bumptious”, Winner provoked comparison with Genghis Khan. Even close friends found him “cherubic, cheerful and dreadful”. Flamboyant, often boorish, he was, in many ways, his own worst enemy.

The veteran critic Barry Norman (who, in an earlier incarnation as a gossip columnist on the Daily Mail, had been ordered to fire Winner, then one of his underlings) considered him entertaining enough, “but he can also be rude and a bully, as if it amuses him to confront the world in the guise of a self-made shit ... Perhaps what gripes him is that he wanted to be a great director and never became one.”

Surprisingly for a man who described his most successful work as a “puddle of blood”, Winner was house-proud to the point of obsession. He employed a staff of nine who were required to sweep every carpet, dust every picture and polish every surface daily, and he admitted to spending occasional evenings dusting the tops of the doors.

A staunch supporter of Margaret Thatcher, whom he described as “one of my favourite ladies”, Winner rarely missed an opportunity to endorse her policies. In later life he was in demand for his views on topics ranging from film censorship (to which he was vigorously opposed), to the virtues of law and order (equally vigorously in favour).

In the 1980s he became founding chairman of the Police Memorials Trust, a charity dedicated to raising plinths in memory of policemen and women killed in the line of duty. In 2005 he presided as the Queen unveiled the National Police Memorial in The Mall, designed by Norman Foster.

Winner admitted that he had come late to good works and maintained that he had set up the charity only because he was advised against doing so. Not all its initiatives found favour with the service. For these, and for his countless politically-incorrect misdemeanours, in 2012 he was named the 38th most annoying person in Britain.

An only child, Michael Robert Winner was born in London on October 30 1935. His grandfather, a Russian immigrant, ran a chain of menswear shops, but his father went into property, prospered, and amassed a large collection of paintings, furniture and jade.

Michael’s eccentric Jewish mother suffered a lifelong addiction to gambling, and Winner recalled that at his bar mitzvah she threw a poker party; he spent the evening answering the door and taking coats to the cloakroom. She was a regular at the Monte Carlo Casino, where she lost more than £3 million. “She used to pawn my father’s oils,” Winner recalled, “and she stole and sold the deeds to my penthouse to pay her debts, but what can you do? You can’t sue your aged mother.” Indeed, he readily admitted that his mother was the most overpowering woman in his life and even suggested that she had “no doubt unintentionally prevented any kind of marriage”.

Michael was educated at St Christopher Quaker school in Letchworth. A lonely child, and something of a misfit, he sought consolation in the cinema, and spent his weekends and holidays writing about film stars for various papers, including the Sunday Express and the Evening Standard.

At 13 he decided on a career in the film industry and persuaded a local paper — The Kensington Post — to run his weekly film column, which was later syndicated to 32 other papers. At 16 Winner was asked to leave his school because they claimed he was “out of sympathy” with their aims. Judged medically unfit for National Service, he spent a year cramming for his exams before going up to Downing College, Cambridge, in 1953.

At Cambridge he edited the college paper and commissioned work from writers including Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. He left in 1956 with what he described as “a lousy degree” in Law and Economics and immediately began applying for places on various television training courses. Rejected by most of the major companies, he talked his way into a job as an autocue operator before being appointed first assistant director on the ITV series about a one-armed detective, Mark Saber.

In the meantime he began writing screenplays, mainly for thrillers, and made some cinema “shorts” which he learned to edit himself. In 1957 he directed his first travelogue — This is Belgium — shot largely on location in East Grinstead.

Winner had his first full-length screen success the following year when he made Play it Cool, a vehicle for the pop star Billy Fury. Winner went on to direct Shoot to Kill in 1960, and in 1962 wrote and directed The Cool Mikado, which starred Frankie Howerd. Howerd did not enjoy working with Winner and later described the film as “the worst I ever worked on”.

Throughout the 1960s Winner specialised in socially-observant comedies such as The Jokers (1966) and I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname (1967), both starring Oliver Reed. In contrast to the nervous Howerd, Reed responded well to what he described as “a director who shouted louder than I did” and Winner used him again in his 1968 film Hannibal Brooks.

Having made an impression in America, where The Jokers did well, in 1970 Winner made Lawman, a low-budget Western starring Burt Lancaster. After an unsuccessful attempt at retelling The Turn of the Screw in The Nightcomers (1971), starring Marlon Brando, he tried another Western, Chato’s Land. The film starred Charles Bronson as an Indian hunted by a posse after the murder of a sheriff. Critics complained that the film was “bloodthirsty” and “overlong”; but it proved popular with the public.

After making a spy thriller, Scorpio, in 1972 Winner chose the macho Bronson to star in The Stone Killer (1973), as a policeman trying to solve a brutal series of murders. Then, in 1974, came Death Wish.

Winner followed this with what he described as “a bitingly satirical piece” — Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood. The film flopped despite the presence of Phil Silvers and cameo appearances by a variety of stars. So Winner returned to making explicitly violent films with The Sentinel in 1976. His penchant for stage blood and his use of dwarves and the physically handicapped to represent “demons” was not popular with critics. One reviewer described the film as “ideal for people who like to slow down and look at traffic accidents”.

Winner dismissed claims that he was encouraging anti-social behaviour by featuring so much violence in his films. “The public likes action,” he insisted, “it takes their minds off the real world for an hour and that’s what entertainment is all about.”

Some saw his reworking of classic films such as The Big Sleep (1977) and The Wicked Lady (1982) as attempts to win critical support. Neither film proved successful at the box office and, again, he returned to his proven formula, this time with Death Wish II (1981).

The film featured Bronson still wreaking vengeance on a collection of muggers and rapists. It fell foul of both the censor and feminist critics due to a particularly brutal gang rape scene. “I don’t think people are affected by what they see,” Winner insisted. “It’s fantasy, people don’t watch a murder and then go out and commit one.”

And yet, despite claiming that he did not support any form of vigilantism, Winner made donations to the vigilante group known as the Guardian Angels. He was regularly quoted as dismissing the censorship code as “absolute piffle” and created a furore when he accused the Prince of Wales of being “ignorant of the facts” about censorship.

He claimed that incidents of crime and sexual offences had increased since the government had tried to cut violence from the screen, and cited Japan as proof of his theory. “They have the most sexually violent and explicit literature in the world,” he declared, “but their crime rate is the lowest.”

Winner went on to make Death Wish III (1985) which, while critically mauled, was financially even more successful than the previous two films. “I’d have Charles Bronson starring in Death Wish XXVI,” he insisted,

“if I thought it would make a profit.”

Throughout the 1980s Winner veered between commercial action films and mainstream comedies such as Bullseye (1989), starring Michael Caine and Roger Moore. In 1989 he made another attempt at winning critical support with his adaptation of the Alan Ayckbourn play A Chorus of Disapproval. The film featured stars such as Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Irons and Prunella Scales, but flopped.

In 1991 Winner made a departure from film-making to host the television programme True Crimes (LWT), featuring re-enactments of various famous criminal cases. The series mirrored the BBC programme Indelible Evidence, even to the point of having Winner (like his BBC counterpart Ludovic Kennedy) introduce each case from the depths of a leather armchair.

Later that year Winner embarked on another film, an adaptation of the novel Dirty Weekend. Although denying that the film was “a female version of Death Wish”, he did admit that the plot dealt with a female vigilante who hunts down and kills the men who raped her.

He produced and directed his last full-length film project, Parting Shots, featuring Chris Rea, Ben Kingsley, Felicity Kendal, Oliver Reed and Joanna Lumley, in 1998. He also appeared in, wrote and directed numerous television commercials, notably his “Calm down, dear” series for an insurance company.

When not making films Winner spent most of his time at his 46-roomed Victorian mansion in Holland Park, formerly the home of the painter Sir Luke Fildes, where he housed his collection of fine furniture and paintings. His father had leased the house after the war and turned it into flats; Winner bought out the other tenants one by one and restored it. In 2011 he announced that he was putting the house on the market.

“I don’t go out much,” he recalled, “partly because I get bored sitting next to the same person for three hours and partly because I started giving my hostesses marks out of 10 for their cooking.” He spent his free time gardening (“my garden is floodlit so I quite often garden after midnight”) or with a string of girlfriends, notably the actress Jenny Seagrove. After a relationship lasting several years, the couple broke up in 1993. “Girlfriends have to be cheerful,” he insisted, “light and bright is essential, otherwise, what’s the point?”

Winner claimed that his life had not altered in the past 40 years. “I do essentially the same things I did as an 18-year-old,” he said. “I go on dates, I make films, I write, nothing has really changed.”

He was a regular panellist on Radio 4’s Any Questions, and later appeared on television programmes including the BBC’s Question Time and Have I Got News For You. He was an honorary member of Bafta and of the Directors’ Guild of Great Britain.

Winner had a love-hate relationship with journalists, and — like Tony Benn — insisted on recording interviews lest he was misquoted. On the other hand he regarded newspapers as a convenient platform for his manifold opinions and for nearly 10 years wrote a page on politics and life in the News of The World; he was also a regular contributor to the Daily Mail.

Most notably, from 1994 he wrote what eventually became Winner’s Dinners, a weekly column about food and restaurants in The Sunday Times. It was during these culinary excursions, invariably illustrated by a photograph of Winner mugging for the camera with the proprietor of the (usually eye-wateringly expensive) establishment under review, that he gave fullest vent to his reputation as a world-class curmudgeon.

Winner’s books included a collection of his food columns ; and an autobiography, Winner Takes All (2004), with further recollections in Unbelievable! (2010) and Tales I Never Told (2011). His last publication, Michael Winner’s Hymie Joke Book, appeared in 2012.

His love of rich food and cigars eventually caught up with him. In August 1993, after suffering acute chest pains, he was told that he would have to undergo a triple heart bypass operation. Then, in January 2007, he contracted the rare disease vibrio vulnificus after eating an oyster in Barbados.

He counted himself lucky to have survived at all, but his health continued to decline, and last summer he was given only two years to live. Having filed his final restaurant column last December, he auctioned his collection of more than 100 original children’s book illustrations, including the earliest depictions of Winnie-the-Pooh by EH Shepard.

Meanwhile he turned down the offer of an OBE for his work on behalf of the police, remarking: “An OBE is what you get if you clean the toilets well at King’s Cross Station.” On Twitter, Winner subsequently claimed that he had declined a knighthood.

He also revealed that he had been investigating the possibility of travelling to the assisted suicide clinic Dignitas in Switzerland. “I’ve got no fear about death,” he said recently. “I’m very happy to snuff it; you have to live with the cards you’ve been dealt with.” But he admitted that not having children was a “the one mistake that wipes out everything I have ever done”.

In 2011 he married Geraldine Lynton-Edwards, whom he had met in 1957 when he was 21.